The Sobieski Stuarts and the Royal Lady’s Magazine: Some Newly-Attributed Tales

Identifies and describes19 previously unrecorded periodical tales, some in multiple parts, contributed to the Royal Lady\u27s Magazine in 1831-34, by the prolific early Victorian Stuart pretenders John and Charles Sobieski Stuart, providing evidence for the attributions and the brothers\u27 pen-names, and quadrupling their known literary output

Loyalism, legitimism, and the neo-Jacobite challenge to the Anglo-Scottish Union

Those who continued with its cause into the late Victorian age, framed loyalism as a principled challenge to the constitutional settlement that culminated in the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. The case for restoring the House of Stuart, the focal point of their efforts, had become a distinctive strand within British loyalism but in many respects remained tangential to the movement for home rule in Scotland. Restoration of the Stuarts necessitated the acts of Settlement and Union be set aside and thus represented a more fundamental challenge to the Imperial parliament than the constitutional reform sought by home rulers. The article examines those late Victorian loyalists who recast the home rule cause to advance the tenets of loyalism ¬as their forebears in revolutionary America had done – within the day’s foremost democratic debate on rights, freedoms, and the limits of governmental power

Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851

PhDThe thesis concentrates on the work of fourteen antiquaries active in the period from the French Revolution to the Great Exhibition in England, Scotland and France. I have used a combination of the antiquaries’ published works, which cover, among other subjects, architecture, topography, costume history, Shakespeare and the history of furniture, alongside their private papers to develop an account of that lived engagement with the past which characterised the romantic period. It ends with the growing professionalisation and specialisation of historical studies in the mid-nineteenth century which left little room for the self-generating, essentially romantic antiquarian enterprise. In so far as this subject has been considered at all it has been in the context of what has come to be called ‘the invention of tradition’. It is true that the romantic engagement with history as narrative led to some elaboration of the facts, while the newness of the enterprise laid it open to mistakes. I have not ignored this. The restoration of the Bayeux Tapestry, the forged tartans of the Sobieski Stuarts and the creation of Shakespeare’s Birthplace are all considered. Overall, however, I have been concerned not to debunk but as it were to ‘rebunk’, to see the antiquaries in their historical context and, as far as possible, in their own terms

The Journal of the Friends' Historical Society vol. 4 No. 1

1. Notes and Queries. 2. Our Bibliographers. 3. A New Book on George Fox. 4. American Letters of Edmund Peckover. 5. Meeting Records. 6. Friends at Newbury, Berkshire. 7. Presentations of Quakers in Episcopal Visitations, 1662-1679. 8. Friends on the Atlantic. 9. The Collection of Friends' Books in the Library of Haverford College, Pa. 10. The late Duke of Argyle's Estimate of Elizabeth Fry. 11. A so-called "Quaker Highwayman". 12. Matthew Raven, Stainesgate, Essex. 13. Brewers Yard Burial Ground. 14. Marriage Certificate - Hough-Barnes, 1676. 15. Paul Bevan's "One Little Book". 16. Land in New Jersey, 1685. 17. Minister and Merchant. 18. Friends in Current Literature. 19. Friends' Reference Library

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Young Chevalier: Unimagined Space

The Young Chevalier’ is the fragment of a novel written in 1892 and first published posthumously in Volume 26 of the Edinburgh Edition of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1897. This chapter examines Stevenson’s plans to redeploy Jacobite history in a less oblique manner than in his previous and much more familiar novels, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, both of which draw on Jacobite history and considers the possible reasons for the novel's unfinished state

Caterwauling and Demon Raising: The Ancient Rite of the Taghairm?

No abstrac

"Monarchy as it should be"? : British perceptions of Poland-Lithuania in the long seventeenth century

Early modern Poland-Lithuania figured significantly in the political perceptions of Europeans in the long seventeenth century – not only due to its considerable size and enormous commercial and military resources, but also, and just as importantly, due to its exceptional religious and political situation. This interest in Poland-Lithuania was shared by many Britons. However, a detailed examination of how Britons perceived Poland-Lithuania at that time and how they treated Poland-Lithuania in their political debates has never been undertaken. This thesis utilises a wide range of the previously neglected source material and considers the patterns of transmission of information to determine Britons’ awareness of Poland-Lithuania and their employment of the Polish-Lithuanian example in the British political discourse during the seventeenth century. It looks at a variety of geographical and historical information, English and Latin descriptions of Poland-Lithuania’s physical topography and boundaries, and its ethnic and cultural make-up presented in histories, atlases and maps, to establish what, where and who Poland-Lithuania was for Britons. Poland-Lithuania’s political framework, with its composite structure and unique relationship between the crown and nobility, elicited a spectrum of reactions, and so this thesis evaluates the role that both criticism and praise of Poland-Lithuania played in British constitutional debates. Consequently, the study argues that Britons’ perceptions of Poland-Lithuania were characterised by great plasticity. It claims that Britons’ impressions of the country were shaped by multiple – real or imagined - borders, whether cultural, economic or political, but also that Britons were affected by the exposure to a uniform, idealised historiography of this country. Crucially, the thesis asserts that references to Poland-Lithuania constituted an ingenious ideological and polemical device that was eagerly used throughout the period by Britons of diverse political sympathies. Moreover, through the examination of the kingdom’s geopolitical role, particularly its fluctuating position as a “bulwark of Christendom”, side by side its engagement against Protestants, the thesis challenges the assumption that anti-Catholicism dominated seventeenth-century British perceptions of the world